14.6. Expression Blend

The design-time support for WPF and Silverlight applications is greatly improved in Visual Studio 2010 (see Chapter 15), but for serious Silverlight development a separate product called Expression Blend is near essential.

Expression Blend (written using WPF) is very much aimed at designers and eases tasks such as layout, animation, and customization of controls (Figure 14-3). You will still need to edit code in Visual Studio, but Visual Studio and Blend play well together, so you can have both open at the same time and skip between them.

When a designer and a developer work at the same time on an application, there can be issues as one developer's changes overwrite the others. Microsoft has tried to address this with a declarative data binding syntax and design of Blend. I am not sure they have fully achieved this lofty aim, but it is a step in the right direction. If you want to see whether Blend is worth using for you, download the free trial version of Blend from the main Silverlight.net site at http://silverlight.net/GetStarted/.

Figure 14.3. Expression Blend designer